armyofrobots said:
I remember going to Megacon 2004 and they had a booth and this guy was handing out an issue of it. He was nuts. He was like "TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT CRACKED! IT'S FUNNY!"
I read a page and threw it on the ground...
That's NOT WHAT HAPPENED.
You gave it to me to "hang on to" and at the end of the day, I had three issues of that piece of shit...
PhantomVI said:
The thing I remember most about Cracked when I was ten or so was "The Uglee Family"...flash-forward about seven or eight years and I was reading Dan Clowes' "Eighball". Something about his style seemed familiar... Sure enough, he was the one who drew "The Uglee Family" back in the day.
hell yeah! also, as a somewhat related aside, Peter Kuper now draws Spy vs. Spy for mad.
Tom DeFalco? What, couldn't they get Joe Quesada to leave Marvel Comics and mess up another company? C'mon, even Bob Harras is a better choice than DeFalco!
I used to read MAD occasionally as a kid, but Cracked was the magazine that I read only when I had to... you know, like when your mom drags you to the laundromat, gives you a little money to buy a magazine at the drug store next door, and its newsstand hasn't been restocked in three months. I think the only comic magazine at the time that I held in even lower estimation was CarToons.
Crazy Magazine wasn't a bad effort from Marvel; their clown mascot, Obnoxio, continued popping up in Marvel comics continuity through at least the late 1980s. I do have to admit a preference for (Not) Brand Ecch and What Th...?, however.
Cigarette said:
It was fascinating to my young mind, reading this magazine which was sort of barely interesting and in no way at all humorous. Failures have always interested me more than successes, and I was looking one directly in its black-and-white face.
I had the chicken pox when I was 11, so I was at home and forced to stay in bed for two weeks. Oddly enough, I wasn't satisfied with playing video games and I quickly ran out of movies to watch.
The evening of the second day, my Mom, for no apparent reason, brought me a stack of Mad and Cracked magazines. It was probably a dozen copies.
Other than the occasional game of Mega Man or a random movie, all I did was read those magazines. I don't remember laughing at all. In fact, I don't really remember liking them for any sincere reason.
Both magazines were my first example of liking something purely because it was terrible and missed its aim entirely.
Much later, bored theorists would try to lay an unrelated word like "ironic" to this unrelated sense of "liking crap because it's crap" and use it label a generation (unwillingly, as it always is).
Most people I know like things that are good, not things that openly suck like Cracked magazine.
Once upon a time, when I was young, every so often while at the library I'd have finished my business of finding books and go to the magazine section.
I would sneak a couple MADs to a secluded reading room and devour their deliciously naughty contents. It's not that I liked MAD or thought it was funny, but I was fairly certain I was not supposed to be reading it and that was AWEXOME! It was kind of like looking up "vagina" in the dictionary at school.
I used to like Cracked better, just because it had gotten ahold of me first and i was stuck in some kind of loyalist denial. Just like when i rabidly defended Sega Genesis over SNES or, more recently, DVD-A over SACD. Now my positions on all three have reveresed.
I don't subscribe to Mad but i do manage to read just about every issue, either at the supermarket magazine stand or when i have spare time at the library i work at. I have to say that they've make some very clever and genuinely funny satirical statements, and they'll always be in my personal hall of fame for being the only critics in the world who dared speak ill of the LOTR movies (and not the books).
armyofrobots
Orlando, FL
October 2004
MAR 30, 2005 04:16 PM